The Creation of the World, by Ivan Aivazovsky, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology. This week we look at pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities It’s been a while since we checked in on 3D p...

by Aarti Laddha , Richard Diaz-Cool , Rishika Idnani , Venkatesh Selveraj Netflix supports a vast and evolving set of features and content types, ranging from 4K streaming and immersive audio to live streaming and cloud gaming, across a diverse ecosystem of devices. However, not all devices are created equal. Hardware limitations such as available RAM, CPU cores, display capabilities, or platform support mean that some features cannot be supported on certain device models. To ensure the best...

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too. I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backup...

One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a trickle: once or twice a year somebody would say that an LLM came up with a proof, and then everyone would argue over whether that counted as “real” mathematical innovation. In 2026, it’s a flood. Almost every day I see some new LLM-produced mathematical result. Prompt “engineering” Perhaps the most curious thing about these AI discoveries is how easy...

I hear the birds singing as I sit by the window and look out on the horizon. I like looking at all the colours of the sky in the moments after sunset, when ambers recede and the sky becomes ever more blue before night time. I hear the sound of my fingers typing on my keyboard, too: nature and words are my evening. Nature and words are my evening, and so too is music. Moments ago I was playing on the piano, two songs I love but haven’t played in as long as I can remember. And one more song that...

On my 22nd birthday, two years ago, I had a pretty pleasant day. I don't really remember what about it was good, I probably had an enjoyable task at work and a good time with collegues; and in my good mood, I also went down to the book shop right outside my workplace and picked up War and Peace. The cashier made a little comment as he scanned the book, apparently impressed or surprised. Why'd I pick it up? Well, why would anyone want to read the book? Because it's a classic and everyone says ...

Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we send punctuation to a frontier AI model 649 times and take notes on what crawls out. The night of July 27th, a weird Claude behavior was making the rounds on X. A thread from @merlindru (187K views) flagged a strange Opus 5 failure mode around a specific text, and @fdosmither followed up with a sharper observation about a related trigger: a spaced - - - divider seemed to confuse Claude into treating the user’s turn as unfinished — his s...

Originally published on Rails At Scale . We recently enabled a really cool feature in ZJIT that makes it feel like a Real Compiler™: the inliner! We’ll write more about it soon. In this post, we’ll talk about one excellent concrete benefit we are already seeing and how it optimizes blocks in pretty much every Ruby program. I’ll start off with a refresher on how blocks work in the Ruby interpreter, then show you how ZJIT understands and optimizes that bytecode, and then show you th...

Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024...

I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known as “large reasoning models,” or LRMs, were still new. Nowadays it may seem downright churlish, though, given that a “general-purpose reasoning model” from OpenAI solved a famous open mathematical… Source I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for...

TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more features can we ship? How much cheaper can we build software? I think that’s the wrong question, but I understand why. The first thing AI became good at w...

In 1948, IBM introduced the 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. This machine was a programmable calculator, about the size of a double refrigerator. It was not quite a computer, but was programmed by plugging wires into a plugboard. This machine read numbers from a punch card, performed up to 60 calculations on these numbers, and then recorded the results by punching holes in the card. 1 It processed 100 cards per minute—over one card per second—and IBM advertised it as the equivalent of 150 ...

Go’s proposal for package flag was accepted on July 23, 2026. It fixes an awkward case in programs that read the same setting from command-line flags, environment variables, and defaults. Suppose a server has a -debug flag whose default is false: fs := flag . NewFlagSet ( "serve" , flag . ContinueOnError ) debug := fs . Bool ( "debug" , false , "enable debug logging" ) if err := fs . Parse ( args ); err != nil { return err } The serv...

Sheesh, 162 links this month. What is going ON? There is just too much interesting material being written, and that’s after filtering out clanker slop. I’m pretty sure I need to curtail the scope of these link posts at some point. I added the 🔥 emoji a while back to make it easier for folk to just skim for the top links. It’s been a quiet blogging month for me, with just one post capturing my rant on LinkedIn about companies using LLMs to write content…to feed to LLMs. Thi...

There is nothing I hate more than doing self-promotion. The idea of talking about something I’m doing, I’ve done, or I'm going to do makes my skin crawl. But the opposite, promoting things other people are doing—especially friends—fills me with so much joy that I’ll never miss out on the opportunity of doing it. And that’s why I’m excited to let you know that my longtime friend Mattia is about to embark on another of his trips, this time touching Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan,...

Today, the world is made of people. This gives people a tiny measure of leverage: factory workers can sabotage the machines and halt production, truck drivers can strike and halt the entire economy, the police can stand back and let a protest topple the government , the military can mutiny . This sets a limit to how much the powerful can abuse the powerless: no matter how powerful someone is, how much money they have, how many divisions they command, they are still embedded in a society. They ...

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 31 July 2026 in Portland Oregon, after I just finished today’s show with Russell. Of which, well, that’s the thing that caught my attention. 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! All show all the time, I guess? Next one’s with Dylan Wilbanks -- register, check out the schedule, and watch previous shows on the show page . That’s a lot of the word show all at once. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Organizational Entropy, Activation Energy...

US workplace AI use crossed a line in Q2 2026: 52% of employees now use AI in their role, up from 21% in Q2 2023, per Gallup’s May 6–20, 2026 survey of 22,573 employed adults. Firm-level counts read far lower, near 18%. This post lays out what each survey measures, how the numbers moved, and what workers report doing with the tools. AI Adoption at Work 52% of US employees use AI in their role, Gallup Q2 2026 15% use AI daily, up from 4% in Q2 2023 47% say their organization has in...

We had weird issues on our home network over the last month or so: Large files being transferred over Samba and NFS would time out midway through, and rsync transfers would also fail with “Resource temporary unavailable” messages. Clara would be dropped off our Minecraft server after an indeterminate amount of time playing. KDE on Fedora would constantly spam me with “Connection established” alerts multiple times an hour. Our Apple TV would pause a video with ...

What's up on the smolweb? July 2026 roundup 2026-07-30 06:15 Summer is here, the big web is choking on AI slop, and the smolweb keeps quietly growing. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in July 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,500 active capsules On July 26, Techrights reported that the Lupa crawler (the main Geminispace survey) now lists 4,761 total capsules , with 3,487 recently connected . That is up from 3,400 in April 20...

One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the process of building our (first! exciting!) home, which is an absolute whirlwind of choices and decisions. Maybe it’s where we’re both programmers, but particularly for m...

TAIPEI (July 29, 2026) — Shield AI and Thunder Tiger Corp. today announced the successful completion of Hivemind’s first multi-asset autonomous teaming demonstration on water, validating Shield AI’s Hivemind AI pilot aboard Thunder Tiger SeaShark unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in a coordinated mission. During the demonstration in Pingtung, Taiwan, Thunder Tiger’s SeaShark 600 and SeaShark 800 USVs equipped with Hivemind autonomously executed a coordinated intelligence, surveillance, a...

I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers, is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions. If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free from leanpub. This has been a long time in the making. Formal logic is an incredibly powerful tool to understand software. Everything from “what’s a left outer join” to “why shouldn’t Square inherit from Rect” makes more sense if you know...